Celebrating Data & Society founder danah boyd
“She’s never just doing one thing; she’s always doing 100 things that connect together over time.”
Earlier this month, Data & Society’s founder, danah boyd, announced that she was stepping down from her role as the organization’s board chair — and that she had decided to step away from the board entirely when her current term ends and join D&S’s advisory group. When she does so in March 2023, it will mark exactly ten years since she first sat down to envision the organization. Here, to celebrate danah’s immeasurable contributions to Data & Society and the field at large, some of her many colleagues and collaborators from the organization’s earliest years reflect on her friendship, leadership, and ongoing influence.
An island of misfit toys
danah kind of buttonholed me at a conference and was like, “I’m starting an island of misfit toys” — that was a phrase she kept returning to in the first year of Data & Society. I’m not a traditional academic of any stripe; I don’t have a PhD and never really went through the academic pipeline. But I’ve always been interested in broader issues around tech and society, and at the time had been getting involved in the beginning of what was sort of the machine learning hype cycle. D&S ended up being this incredible place to experiment with a bunch of ideas and dive into a bunch of things that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to. In some ways it was exactly like the vision danah had put out there: It really was an island of misfit toys, in that I don’t think I would have had the opportunity to work on those issues in any other place at that point in life or career.
The first few cohorts were a mix that you would very rarely see at a research or think tank-type institution. Particularly in the first few years, danah was curating and putting together these really fascinating groups of people. D&S is quite intentional in positioning itself as a critical but constructive voice on issues of data driven innovation and AI and machine learning. But at that phase, I feel like everybody was also still trying to figure out what the sharp critiques to be making were. That was one of the most fascinating aspects of being part of it early on: the agenda wasn’t yet set; we were still asking what the agenda should even be. A lot of research centers are basically in the business of creating PDFs that no one reads. danah was very aggressive in pushing for us to actually attack the problem.
General counsel, Substack
Former fellow, Data & Society
Sparks of possibility
I can’t quite pinpoint where it was the first time I heard danah speak, but I do remember the moment vividly. It was in a big hotel conference room somewhere out west, either in San Diego at Tim O’Reilly’s ETCon in February 2004 or maybe in Scottsdale, Arizona at PC Forum the next month. A large group of people, mostly men and mostly white, because that was the early Internet scene, were sitting in a scattered circle on the floor and a few chairs, holding an impromptu off-schedule breakout conversation about the future of user-generated content as millions of people turned on to blogging. danah was wearing a furry white hat, one of her signature touches, that made her stand out even more than being one of the only women in the room. But it was what she was saying that really caught my attention.
Blogging, she was telling the group, was a wonderful flowering of democratic expression. But why should one person, the founder of Technorati, which was then making the blogosphere legible and searchable, have all the power to decide what was or wasn’t considered a blog? she asked to appreciative nods. Since the person she was referring to happened to be my much smarter younger brother Dave Sifry, my ears perked up! I hovered closer and then found the courage to start a conversation with her once the circle broke up. Of course, as it turns out, she and he were already friends, and he took the criticism with grace. The truth was, we all agreed: the open web had great potential to expand who had effective voice, but new gatekeepers could easily arise to replace the old ones. We clicked right away.
Fast forward to 2013. We were both attending South by Southwest and collided at an after-party at a house rented by some of the data whizzes from the Obama campaign. “I need to talk to you,” danah beckoned across the crowded living room. We huddled in a stairwell away from the noise. (I’m pretty sure at around this point Dan Wagner, the former chief analytics officer of the Obama 2012 campaign and future founder of Civis Analytics, apologetically squeezed past us clad only in a bath towel on his way in from the house’s backyard pool.) “This isn’t public yet, but Microsoft Research has agreed to help me launch a new center in New York focusing on the impact of data on society,” she said. I was thrilled, not just for her, because at the very same time my then-work partner Andrew Rasiej and I had started exploring the idea of creating something we then were calling “Personal Democracy Center,” after our annual conference, but which eventually became Civic Hall, our hub for civic tech in NYC. What if we could co-locate, danah and I wondered aloud, to create a home base for scholars and activists, researchers and makers? Sparks of possibility flashed between us.
Over the next year, we kept in regular contact as we pursued our parallel projects. Alas, her and our launch timing didn’t quite align and the fledgling Data & Society Research Institute got going in early 2014, about nine months before we opened our doors at Civic Hall. But to our happiness, we did the next best thing to finding a common space and sharing rent. We ended up around the corner from each other. D&S had found its funky digs on the top floor of 36 West 20th St. Civic Hall started out around the corner, at 156th Fifth Ave, between 20th and 21st. We bumped into each other regularly, and even once coordinated a holiday office crawl to welcome New America when it opened its satellite office a few blocks away.
Those early days are now a blur of emails, membership applications, onboarding, funder pitches, seminars, webinars, and constant, constant experimentation. It turns out that building a new institution, especially one centered on involving a large and diverse community of co-creators, is really complicated! I suspect that neither of us back in 2013, in that noisy stairwell, had any idea the journey we were each setting out upon. From small seeds mighty oaks grow. My deepest congratulations to danah for having the foresight and courage to start D&S. I can’t wait to see what she does next!
Co-founder, Civic Hall
Navigating multiple roles
I was a new mom in the early days of Data & Society, and one of the things that will always stick with me is how warmly danah and the rest of the team treated me in accommodating that. I can’t count the number of times I fed or changed my baby at D&S, or how many pairs of arms held my infant when I needed a break, or how many times danah (also a new mama at the time) commiserated with me over the sleeplessness of those early days. I’ll never forget that; I was so anxious about how to navigate being a researcher and a parent at the same time, and it meant so much to know that D&S was a place where I was welcome to be both.
Associate professor, Department of Information Science, Cornell University
Former fellow, Data & Society
A form of genius
I was honored when danah reached out to me as she was thinking about setting up a new organization. We had worked closely together at the Berkman Center when she was a fellow, co-authored a paper, and conspired on various good works. I have always cherished a chat or a call with danah — I never quite know what to expect and I always come away smarter and inspired. This chat was no different. Her idea forD&S made immediate and perfect sense to me. The frame of reference for the issues on which we were working was shifting and the then-extant organizations were not well suited for the task. It’s always important to ask hard questions about whether a new organization is in fact needed before starting one — and danah had absolutely nailed it in this case. The immediate reaction of partners, researchers, funders, and the public made plain just how right she was. This is a form of genius: to see something needed and to hold up the flagpole for others to see, and around which to gather and rally. That’s a huge strength of danah’s and one that has propelled the organization. It was so fun to be a founding board member and I can’t wait to see what’s next for Data & Society and for danah’s own work.
President, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Founding board member, Data & Society
Building something new
I’d known danah boyd for more than a decade before the first time she hinted to me that she had a bigger plan. The idea was as ambitious a vision as I’d heard, trying to truly reckon with the profound changes that technological acceleration was wreaking on society — across culture, politics, labor, media, academia, and more. Of course, the idea that tech would transform society was hardly new. But an approach that was fluent in all of these concerns, and which would build a network that connected all of these communities, was profoundly new. It required building an organization that was fundamentally different from any that had tried to tackle these questions before. And that meant it needed a leader unlike any other, who could be credible and fluent in all of these disciplines.
danah is that unique leader. Even as the landscape has changed, as Data & Society evolved and grew, and society (and the organization!) faced extraordinary challenges, she has been able to outline a vision that sees a path forward when others can’t. Perhaps the greatest tribute to danah’s vision is the caliber of extraordinary minds she is able to bring into the Data & Society network; I’m never more inspired than when I see what the community is discovering, creating and convening.
Perhaps one of the best examples of that unique power is one of the earliest — the “Social, Cultural & Ethical Dimensions of ‘Big Data’” event in March of 2014 was an extraordinary convening, alongside NYU’s Information Law Institute and the White House. It wasn’t just remarkable for a brand new organization to be partnering with such august institutions, but also for an event to be so deeply interrogating the topic from all perspectives, right at the peak of the “Big Data” hype. And one of the most common refrains I heard that day from people who attended was how they had never met so many of the other people in the room, who had come from so many other disciplines. The very first introduction to Data & Society that so many people had was of the surprising and powerful value of connecting people in unexpected ways, to think deeply about some of our biggest challenges, across fields that too often never get to collaborate.
It’s a tribute to danah’s prescience and vision that this still holds so true nearly a decade after I first heard her describe the idea behind what would become Data & Society. Even as new leaders and team members have come in and made their own impact and helped evolve the organization into something completely new, that ambition and inspiration stays true. It’s especially heartening in a time when the stakes are higher than ever, and when so many of the ideas pioneered by the brilliant minds within the organization are now part of our daily conversations.
I worry every day about the dangers and the harms that today’s tech might pose, and I am hopeful every day about the potential and the benefits that tech might provide. But I am profoundly optimistic about the impact that Data & Society and its community will have on those outcomes, and deeply grateful to danah boyd for catalyzing it, and for inviting me to try to help with that mission.
Head of Glitch and VP, Developer Experience, Fastly
Founding board member, Data & Society
Showing, not telling
danah is unparalleled in her generosity, and in her ability to navigate between and be excited by insights — which are fundamentally what she loves, and which really set the research culture at Data & Society. With danah, it was never just, “can you slightly build on the mountain of work that has come before you?” It was always insights first.
As a mentor, she’s there if you need to ask a specific question or seek advice, or to direct you to other people in her network who can address those things better, but she’s never going to try to manage you beyond that. It’s amusing to her to see other people learn to navigate different systems, and to see how they can unlock access to different modes of power, credentials, and influence. She’s the most fun to brainstorm with, or to puzzle through a strange collection of observations with, until you hit upon that “aha” moment of how they all come together. But so much of what danah did at D&S, she did by showing rather than telling. She’ll teach you how to do anything she can do if you’re paying attention. Behind the scenes, though, she is powerfully advocating for you to have enough resources, time, and space to accomplish a rare feat she believes you’re capable of, often running against the grain to advance that opportunity. She never lets institutional norms act as a barrier — they are just another variable to contend with. At D&S, she found new pathways for junior researchers to become public scholars and experts, leading with their empirical insights and drawing attention to the work of both their academic and activist colleagues, too.
Because of her networks, her early insights are prescient; and because of her prescience, she brings a sense of urgency to issues that affect society. And that’s the key to danah’s philosophy, in the end. She’s never just doing one thing; she’s always doing 100 things that connect together over time. I can’t wait to do whatever we’re doing next.
Author of Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work
Former senior researcher, Data & Society
Creating an ethos
I first heard about the idea of Data & Society from danah in 2013, and my first thought was: yes, clearly, data is all around us, and the idea of an institute to make sense of its impact on society sounds really cool. But when she asked if I wanted to apply for a fellowship, my reaction was — “what can I possibly contribute? I’m a journalist, not a researcher.” She said, “Is there some other way you could be involved? Maybe you can help us think about how to communicate the kinds of research that goes on here.”
At that point, I had been reading a lot of science fiction, and I kept thinking about the Hieroglyph Project, led by the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, which came out in book form in 2014. In the early days of science fiction, writers like Isaac Asimov had imagined utopian future worlds and given scientists and technologists ideas for inventions like cellphones and space stations.
Stephenson believed recent science fiction had become too dystopian and wanted to get it back to those inspirational roots. I also felt that science fiction could help people imagine the consequences of new technologies in more immediate ways than a dry academic paper, and that turning the research at D&S into fictional scenarios might help it reach a wider public. So I said to danah, “I’ve never written science fiction before, but how about you hire me as a science fiction writer in residence?” And she said okay.
danah was focused on getting the quirkiest, most interesting people she could think of — people who didn’t quite belong in a traditional academic framework — and mashing them together to see what happened. That created what I think of as the ethos and the culture of Data & Society. There was a sense of experimentation and invention: Concepts like algorithmic bias, which by now are somewhat widely understood, were still quite new and the general public didn’t even have language for them yet. We were trying to coin that language. I remember a group of us discussing various metaphors we’d encountered for data — data as an exhaust or waste product, data as liquid (data streams), data as vapor (the cloud), data as “the new oil” — so we could find ways to make the ideas resonate with people.
Since D&S I’ve held various jobs in journalism, but the ideas I picked up as a fellow have informed how I’ve approached all those jobs. Having fellows come into Data & Society and then go back out into the world feels to me like it must be one of the biggest impacts the institute has had — an effective way of embedding its ideas in the broader culture.
Global editorial director, WIRED
Former fellow, Data & Society
Connecting dots
danah and Data & Society gave me a unique experience as a practicing librarian to set aside my day-to-day work to dive deeper into areas I was passionate about in my field, all of which has been a springboard into years of impactful projects. It wasn’t just because of the time and space that Data & Society offered when I was a fellow, it was also because of the investment danah had in me and my ideas. I remember early in my time at Data & Society, danah and I met when our “office” was a space in the New York Times building. I told her about ideas I had for writings and projects. She could take the ideas, connect so many dots and add ideas for projects and suggest people to speak to. I had never worked with anyone so willing to share their ideas and their time and to genuinely want my rough ideas to turn into real, impactful work. My time at Data & Society changed my career direction, and I’ve continued to work on grant-funded projects that support and improve libraries across the country.
Founder and president, Electronic Resources & Libraries
Former fellow, Data & Society
The high priestess of internet friendship
I’m trying to think of any time in the 21st century when I did not know and admire danah boyd, but there isn’t one. I believe danah may well own the century!
I cannot remember when we met. It was around 2005, she was still a doctoral student, and there was already a buzz about this brilliant computer science student who had worked with the legendary Andy Van Dam at Brown and was now studying racism and gender inequality on the internet at Berkeley with wonderful Peter Lyman. I and David Theo Goldberg and many others had founded an idealistic network in 2002, HASTAC (“haystack”: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory), now often called “the world’s first and oldest academic social network.” We wanted a great way to interact, so together with Kevin Franklin (then also at the University of California Research Institute, directed by David), we worked with other colleagues at Stanford and build the first HASTAC site (so way back, it existed before the Way Back Machine…) and talked with a guy in a little cement garage-like structure about building this thing called a “wiki” to go along with our display website where people could interact freely with one another, collaborating on research. That guy was Jimmy Wales, who, with others, launched Wikipedia later that year. Early days. Very, very early days. Dawn of modern internet time early days. And danah was there. (And, yes, HASTAC still exists, with 18,000 network members, and is going strong, moving this year to HASTAC Commons, joining the Humanities Commons… the dream continues!)
I don’t remember who introduced us. Was it Mimi Ito, who would become such an incredible colleague as part of the Digital Media and Learning Initiative at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation? Or was it Ruzena Bajcsy, the computer science professor at Berkeley who headed the Cyberinfrastructure Division at NSF and who gave HASTAC our first funding as part of her “collaboratory” initiative? I don’t remember.
All I remember was reading early papers, maybe even chapters, and sitting rapt in the audience whenever danah presented the ethnographic work that would eventually become It’s Complicated. What she was researching were exactly the ideals and fears about equality and technology that HASTAC was founded on. We were dedicated to the same mission that danah was researching — may well have been the only one who was researching it then. The hype was that the internet was going to transcend race and gender. Information would be free, and equal. Right. We knew that was not the case and early, very early, turned to danah and her ethnographic work.
I don’t recall which publication dubbed danah the “high priestess of internet friendship” but I attest to the accuracy of the term. Half of the people I know doing work on equality and the internet, I met through danah. And her friendship is one I value deeply. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as “superficial friendship” with danah. I remember so many conversations where we instantly went deep: What do you value? Who do you value? Who are the people, what are the ideals, that shape you? What do you want in the future? How will you make that happen? How will we get there?
We. When I think of danah boyd (lower case), I think of “WE,” in all caps. She creates networks, communities, organizations, bonds, friendships. She gives to others, lets others share her limelight, and makes sure there’s always a glow for others to bask in. It is a deeply human quality, a deeply loving quality. With everyone else, I thank her for founding Data & Society, and wish her the very best in whatever will be her next chapter. We all know that chapter will be well worth reading.
Senior Advisor on Transformation to the Chancellor, CUNY
Cofounder and Codirector, HASTAC
An overheard conversation
danah has been at the vanguard of the best thinking on data, technology, and what comes next. Data & Society was created ahead of its time, and just in time.
She and I met completely by accident: We happened to be at Shake Shack at the same time. We didn’t know each other at all. Waiting in line, I overheard her talking about data and her work on her book It’s Complicated, and various things she was thinking about; I interrupted her conversation to ask who she was and what she was talking about, and we ended up talking for two hours.
At the time, at the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, data science for social impact was something we wanted to be involved in and devote some attention to but we had no idea what that would look like. After that conversation in Shake Shack, danah became the person I came to to help me think through strategy, and to call bullshit: is an idea or approach authentic, is it real, is it effective? She brought this very technical but also practical understanding of the applications of data and what it means for society. She understood the opportunities and challenges, and what to watch out for. That has framed our thinking a hundred times over.
Founder and president, Center for Inclusive Growth
Executive vice president of corporate sustainability, Mastercard
Articulating the stakes
I always have to make sure that I’ve had enough sleep the night before I see danah, because she has so much energy and enthusiasm, and so much creativity. She has a voracious curiosity and a boundless enthusiasm to take on all kinds of challenges, and an ability to see where things connect before other people do. What she was able to build with her partners, and with all the researchers at D&S in such a short period of time — the breadth and utility of the work — was really remarkable to me. There have been moments where I needed to ask a question about some tech phenomenon we’re concerned about, and if it wasn’t danah or someone at D&S who knew about it, danah was a degree of separation from some of the smartest thinkers on what was happening. She’s been an incredible resource in that way.
The early work she did at Data & Society in partnership with the Leadership Conference (which coordinates the Civil Rights, Technology and Privacy Table) to create an opportunity for tech and civil rights groups to come together to imagine and articulate the Civil Rights Principles for Big Data, was particularly important.The process of getting the different groups to find shared language was really what got the two fields to gel, to collaborate in a more honest and useful way, and to function at such a high level. danah and D&S’s role in creating a platform and incentive for that to happen was invaluable to the field.
When it came to the census, danah knew disinformation was going to be a big problem. She was really clear in explaining the vulnerabilities that we needed to anticipate, and also making it clear how unprepared we were for what was coming. The fact that she made such a compelling argument and was clear about the stakes, made us take the threat seriously and invest in it. It involved a whole lot of work, figuring out how to get very, very busy organizations — who already had more than enough to do working on the census — to also work collaboratively with communications experts and technology researchers to put together threat models and figure out how they would respond to disinformation if it came. And then of course, it came.
Ford was funding census work regardless. But if there hadn’t been the force multiplier of challenges associated with the census, and danah’s very, very clear articulation of the harms, I don’t think we would have invested in disinformation as a piece of that work. And that work led a whole bunch of groups to get smarter and quicker in thinking about how they anticipate and respond to disinformation when it’s happening.
Director, Ford Foundation Catalyst Fund
A dream team
danah and I have a long history of working together; we met when we were both graduate students, and have since written six articles and countless conference papers together. When danah told me she was founding a new research institute, I had just finished my postdoc with her at the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England. I was intrigued; what did “data” mean in this context? What would this institute look like? Over the next few months, as things started to take shape, I was busy starting a new faculty job, so my memories of these early years are hazy. D&S had a series of temporary spaces. My favorite was the incubator in the New York Times building, where I grabbed a desk to co-work with danah as we had done so many times before. I mulled over the edits to my first book while enjoying the fancy cafeteria, hoping to spot my favorite NYT personalities. While I worked, I have vague recollections of danah and Seth Young hashing out what danah referred to as one of her “babies” (the other baby was an actual baby), and I marveled to see a brand new venture taking shape, even with my peripheral involvement.
A few years later I was a frequent visitor to Data & Society, as I often stopped by to co-work and attend Databites. Frustrated with my faculty job, I applied to be a fellow for the 2016–2017 cycle, pitching a book on privacy (by the way, I just finished that book, The Private is Political, and it is coming out next year. The reason for its extreme lateness will become clear). That was a somewhat crazy time to be at D&S. The run-up to the 2016 election was highly dramatic. On the day of the election, postdoc Julia Ticona and I, who both went to Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, Wellesley, posed at D&S decked out in Hillary and Wellesley gear, anticipating a huge Clinton victory; we all know what happens next. November 3, 2016 was a traumatic day. I had a horrible interview the next morning for a Netflix documentary on celebrity, and I arrived at D&S for the interview in full stage makeup, feeling like I had been hit by a truck. Literally the last thing I wanted to do was be on camera. As employees trickled in, it was immediately clear that everyone was a mess. As we watched Clinton’s concession speech, half of the room was crying. danah called a meeting to process our feelings, but I didn’t know what to do with mine.
It turned out that what we would all do was channel our feelings into work. Months earlier, danah had a tip from someone that far-right message boards had been organizing to push anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messaging into the mainstream media, with stunning success. A small group of researchers, including Robyn Caplan and fellow faculty fellow Mark Ackerman, began tracking these messages, often infiltrating Discord channels and Tor sites to see what was going on. I joined the team, along with an all-star cast (all of whom are still doing incredible work: Becca Lewis, now at Stanford; Caroline Jack, now at UCSD; Robyn, starting at Duke next year; Matt Goerzen, now at Harvard; and Francesca Tripodi, now a beloved colleague of mine at UNC), and we formalized the work. It was hard. It involved spending a ton of time on white supremacist sites, meticulously tracking how information moved from fringe spaces to the mainstream media, a process we called “trading up the chain.” I began running the team, and we collectively published a body of work I am still extraordinarily proud of — the first qualitative team devoted to the study of disinformation. Our work tremendously influenced the nascent field of disinformation studies, providing a critical counterpoint to “big data” studies of disinformation that often de-emphasize its hateful nature.
Throughout, danah was a touchstone: an enormous amount of the team’s output is deeply influenced by her intellectual contributions and guidance, including the flagship report that Becca and I wrote (with lots of help from the entire team), Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. That time was both wonderful and terrible. We were knee-deep in the internet’s worst garbage, and we constantly witnessed the mainstream media falling for anti-Clinton propaganda, as far-right ideas mainstreamed at alarming rates. Francesca and Matt actually attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and returned to the team deeply shaken. At the same time, it was a dream team of intellect, and our ideas constantly intermingled, making all of our work stronger. We processed everything we were seeing and experiencing together, and used our shared critical frameworks to make sense of things that often seemed baffling.
I left the team in late 2017 to start a new faculty job at UNC, where, after a few years, I was able to help found a new dream team of critical disinformation researchers. I still deeply miss that time at D&S. I feel that I’m at my best when I’m working with outstanding people, and danah has been a mentor, friend, and collaborator to me like no other. I am sad to see her leave D&S, but not that sad, because I know she and I will work together again some day. Her impact not only on the organization, but on our entire research field and the people in it, is unparalleled.
Associate professor of communication, principal researcher, and co-founder, the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Advisor and former fellow, Data & Society
